Astro 7: Planets and Climate

1. Astro 7: Planets and Climate *Rick Nolthenius *Office: 706a 479-6506, but better… *email: rinolthe@cabrillo.edu *visit my extremely excellent website!

2. They call me…. Rick

3. Textbook – “The Cosmic Perspective – Solar System” by Bennett, Donahue, Schneider, and Voit • Use any edition you can find, they’re all essentially identical. Later is better of course, but get any edition you can afford. • Text is used only for the first ~half of the course. • 2nd half of course we’ll specialize on climate evolution of the Earth and you’ll use mostly the PowerPoints I’ve developed, and some supplementary web material I’ve written from assembled research.

4. Grading • 6 mult. choice quizzes based on text, lectures, on-line material. - ~10 questions each - closed notes • One video quiz, after seeing ~50min video program. Take notes and use them for your mult. choice quiz, about 20 questions. • Final Exam: 50 mult. choice questions. You may have a single 8x10 sheet of paper crammed with all the notes you can muster, hand-written only. • Two lowest scores dropped. Those two dropped will include any no-shows. Don’t miss more than two quizzes because… • There are No Make-ups! • Extra Credit possibilities • Buy 10 green narrow scantron sheets from the book store. $3. Cheap! Keep them in your notebook along with a pencil. • One Essay Question • 67% Quizzes, 27% Final, 6% Essay

5. What will we Do in Astro 7? • We start with my own “Chapter 0” on the principles of clear thinking and scientific method • Then the nature of matter, light, and heat – some basic physics • The origin of our solar system and its planets, and solar systems in general • Planetary atmospheres and their evolution, and an introduction to how we infer the climate and atmospheres of planets beyond our solar system • Then, the last half of the course will cover the climate of the Earth; it’s history, observational evidence, long term change for the future. • And, we’ll look especially at the time in history about which we have the best data – current climate. We’ll examine the evidence for human-caused climate change, climate modelling, how the ocean, atmosphere, aerosols, clouds, ice, and solar energy interact. • I’ll stress the observational facts and how we use scientific inference to arrive at ideas, how we test them to home in on our current theories of the solar system. • Exams will stress getting a picture of processes and the ‘why’ behind what we see, not as much on memorized factoids.

15. jupiter

16. Venus

17. exoplanet

21. Ocean Acidification